Often, in order to solve complex customer problems in computer networking, some portion of a customer's network is recreated and tested in a lab. Lab recreates typically consume large amounts of manual engineering time by one or sometimes many network engineers. Some recreates can take days, and quite often the task of setting up the recreate environment can require more time than actually testing and figuring out the problem. The manual inefficiencies of this process are thus an expensive use of resources, both in terms of network engineer time and lab configuration time.